[kosta50]

Let’s accept your theory that we cannot really know the Sadducees because their history was written by their enemies and we have no certain proofs.

That's not my "theory" but the position of the scientific community.

Do you see what I am getting at? A Jew is a Jew and to the Pharisees it is matrilineal and religious. To ignore the Pharisaical practice is to be something other than Pharisaical by default. You can call it what you want, but Sadducean as opposed to Pharisaic makes sense. That is the state of modern Jewry.

It's not Sadducean because the Pharisees, in addition to what we know they believe din, also  left us (their version of) what the Sadducees believed in—and modern Jews do not believe that. So, your classification is something popularized in college cafeteria but not in serious research.

You can call modern Jews secularized Pharisees, or wordly rabbinic Judaism, corrupted, relativistic, whatever, but not Sadducean because no Jewish, sect as far as I know, holds on to Sadducean beliefs. You are confusing their openness to the outside, their lax observance, with their religious beliefs.

[1010RD]

So, your classification is something popularized in college cafeteria but not in serious research.

Simple opinion which you've stated twice as an ad hominem attempt to dismiss what is scholarly. One expects more from you Kosta.

My ideas are sound and based in fact. Continually dissembling in an attempt to preserve an untenable position isn't thoughtful. One cannot argue all sides and then pretend to be right.

You state that we cannot "know" what the Sadducees believed and I refuted that more than once using simple logic and inductive reasoning. You are playing word games, which is not unusual.

As it stands the vast majority of modern Judaism practice a belief system (including worshiping Jesus Christ)well below the Pharisaic minimum as understood in the Scriptures and Jewish history. We have three choices then in defining them; 1) as Pharisees; and 2) as not-Pharisees, namely Sadducees or Essenes. Essene is eliminated by definition: modern Jews are not ascetics. The essential differences between Pharisees and Sadducees can be known by historical reference, the Scriptures, and by simple logic and inductive reasoning (already demonstrated). That 65%-85% of Jews reject the oral tradition and ignore most Pharisaic teachings makes them Sadducean (or not-Pharisaic(?)).

Jewish in the way Kennedy's are Catholics. Ambivalent, but still trying, sometimes and maybe as convenient.